Simulation Study On Reactor For Hydrogen Production By Methanol Reforming

Nowadays,the pace of global development is getting faster and faster,and fossil energy tends to be scarce.People urgently need to find some sustainable and clean fuels to replace fossil energy.Hydrogen energy has many advantages such as high calorific value,sustainable,clean and carbon-free,and is considered to be one of the most ideal energy sources,and has received extensive attention from various countries.In 2021,my country proposes the goal of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality,and hydrogen energy will play an important role.At present,various countries are vigorously developing hydrogen fuel vehicles,but most of them use hydrogen storage tanks to store hydrogen to provide hydrogen,which has great potential safety hazards.At the same time,the establishment of a hydrogen refueling station is also difficult,so the on-board in-situ hydrogen production method came into being.This method uses fuel to react to generate hydrogen to supply energy for the car,which solves the safety problem of large-scale and long-term storage of hydrogen in the car.In this paper,the method of hydrogen production by methanol steam reforming is selected for research.First,the Aspen software was used to simulate and analyze the hydrogen production system of methanol steam reforming,and the suitable reaction conditions range for hydrogen production and CO removal was preliminarily obtained.After that,a methanol reforming hydrogen production reactor is designed in this paper,and the heat and mass transfer simulation analysis of the reactor is carried out through the three-dimensional modeling of COMSOL software.The temperature distribution of the reactor is uniform,there is no local hot spot,and the overall heat transfer capacity is good.Under the conditions of a water-to-alcohol ratio of 1.6 and a feed flow rate of 1m/s,the methanol conversion rate reached 98.3%,the hydrogen content was 74%,and the carbon monoxide concentration was reduced to less than 10 ppm,which could meet the requirements of fuel cells.Finally,the product gas is simplified in this paper,and the feed gas with a molar ratio of hydrogen to carbon dioxide of 3:1 is fed into the fuel cell for simulation analysis.The results show that the hydrogen reaction amount is less at high working voltage,and the current density is small but distributed.Uniform;under the low operating voltage state,the amount of hydrogen reaction is large,and the current density is large but there is an obvious current density gradient,which may be the influence of the high concentration of carbon dioxide on it.Overall,the fuel cell can work normally,but it still needs to be optimized in the future.The purpose of this research is to design a highly integrated reactor with high hydrogen production to provide hydrogen source for fuel cells,realize the combined use of hydrogen production reactors and fuel cells,and provide a feasible technical route for hydrogen fuel cells.